When Great Trees Fall

When Great Trees Fall
by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly.  Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed.  They existed.
We can be.  Be and be
better.  For they existed.
****************************************

Christa showed me that poem when Dad died, someone had shown it to her. And I could never believe how incredibly well it described losing someone close to you. I made a copy for Corey and her mom and they felt the same way.

Today, because it's becoming fall, because the air is cool and clean in the morning, because we just said goodbye to Ron, because we spent a weekend talking about all of our dads we had lost, I feel that light, sterile air. I feel the first couple weeks after Dad died when everything had a subdued silence and I longed for something to comfort me.

I made chicken and rice soup to help with a cold and considered going for a run. But the cool air made me want to hunker down and remember how to breathe. I feel the need for something I don't remember, a past comfort that's always brought on by the fall and I can never quite put my finger on it. I bought a couple scented candles and a couple plants to try to find whatever it was. There's something familiar here in the morning fog and short days. Sterile I guess explains it as well as anything else. But it's so far into the past that I can never quite get a handle on it.